Quote

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

Lev Grossman

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Lev Grossman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 26
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Lexington
Massachusetts
Past
Stills
Still
Back
Play
Ruins
Going
Staying
Way
Danger
Would
Present

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There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
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The real world is horrible.
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It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.
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It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.
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Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.
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I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
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How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.
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That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.
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His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.
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The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.
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Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
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I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.
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You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.
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It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.
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My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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You're saying the gods don't have free will. The power to make mistakes, Penny said. Only we have that. Mortals
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The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.
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Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was trying to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders.
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Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.
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